Fifty years ago, the composer debuted his tape-loop experiment Come Out—a piece that put forth the voice of a man beaten by police, an injustice that still reverberates in our Black Lives Matter moment.

Come Out arose from the social unrest of the mid-'60s. Above, police charge a crowd during the Harlem riots of 1964. Photo by Alan Aaronson/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images.

On a spring day in 1964, police in Harlem’s 32nd precinct tried to beat a confession out of two black teenagers for a crime they did not commit. The young men, Wallace Baker and Daniel Hamm, were repeatedly bludgeoned with billy clubs while in custody, beaten with such force that they were taken to a nearby hospital for X-rays.

In an interview at the nearby Friendship Baptist Church a few days after the incident, the 18-year-old Hamm recounted being brutalized in shifts by six to 12 officers over the course of the night, along with the fact that “they got so tired beating us they just came in and started spitting on us.” But even after hours of abuse, the cops weren’t about to allow Hamm to be admitted for treatment, since he was not visibly bleeding. Thinking fast, Hamm reached down to one of the swollen knots on his legs where the blood had clotted beneath his skin: "I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.”

Those 20 words, spoken by a young man who would unjustly remain in prison for nine years, still land like a truncheon. And utilizing just that one sentence, composer Steve Reich made one of the most visceral pieces of music of the 20th century. This month marks the 50th anniversary of Come Out, which made its live debut on April 17, 1966.

In a small way, the piece helped bring about justice for Hamm and other victims of police brutality. It also established the heretofore-unknown Reich as one of the most adventurous modern American composers and became a touchstone of avant-garde and electronic music of all calibers. And now, with the increased scrutiny being brought to bear on police brutality in minority communities, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the vast American carceral state, Hamm’s voice echoes through other names that have recently come into our consciousness: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland. As looped by Reich, the phrase “come out to show them” anticipates powerful hashtags like #ICantBreathe and #SayHerName. For better and worse, the story of Come Out—its unlikely genesis and its aftermath—still resonates.

The incident that led to Hamm’s bruises and blood began with the most innocent of acts: a capsized fruit cart, and a group of Harlem school children who began to throw the fallen grapefruits around like baseballs. But when the shop’s owner whistled for them to stop, it alerted the local police, who reportedly descended upon the kids with a viciousness that frightened all passersby. It was then that Hamm and Baker stepped between the children and the cops, attempting to defuse the situation.

“I saw this policeman with his gun out and with his billy in his hand,” Hamm recounted. “I like put myself in the way to keep him from shooting the kids. Because first of all he was shaking like a leaf and jumping all over the place. And I thought he might shoot one of them.”

In James Baldwin’s 1966 essay “A Report From Occupied Territory,” written as a response to the incidents of that day and the subsequent travesty of justice that followed, he likened his home of Harlem to a police state. “The police are simply the hired enemies of this population,” he wrote. “They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function.” Even in the face of something as innocent as bruised fruit and kids being kids, the fact remains: “Occupied territory is occupied territory… and it is axiomatic… that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces.” Hamm and Baker were arrested, despite the shop owner’s admission that the teens were not involved in the incident.

And while Hamm’s bloodletting did allow him to get medical attention and be released, his freedom was short-lived. Ten days later, on April 30, the stabbing death of Margit Sugar at her used-clothing store in Harlem brought the police back to the teenager’s door. Along with Hamm, they rounded up five other teens: Baker, Walter Thomas, William Craig, Ronald Felder, and Robert Rice. Despite a paucity of evidence and the prosecution's star witness being the one most likely to have actually committed the crime, this group—deemed the “Harlem Six”—was charged with murder, for which the penalty in New York State was death by electric chair. Hamm and the others would remain incarcerated for the next nine years.

“No one in Harlem will ever believe that the Harlem Six are guilty,” Baldwin wrote of the imprisoned teens and the court process that disallowed them from having their own counsel. Soon, the news media distorted their case even further, with The New York Times portraying the Six as members of an anti-white gang called the Blood Brothers. The NAACP insisted that no civil liberties had been violated in the case, but as summer progressed, another instance of police violence—the shooting death of James Powell, a 15-year-old black boy—led to roiling riots in Harlem and Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, precipitating further unrest in Philadelphia, Chicago, Rochester, and throughout New Jersey. Over the next four years, race riots would rage from Watts in Los Angeles, to Detroit and Washington, D.C.

A man is beaten by police during the Harlem riot of 1964. Photo by Buyenlarge/ Getty Images.

Over the next few years, the plight of the imprisoned Harlem Six came to the attention of civil rights activist Truman Nelson as well as a number of celebrities: Baldwin and actor Ossie Davis, poets Amiri Baraka and Allen Ginsberg, philosopher Bertrand Russell, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Nelson recorded interviews with the boys as well as their mothers and put them together into a book entitled The Torture of Mothers in order to raise awareness about their case. In an effort to raise money to cover legal fees for a retrial, Nelson set about organizing a benefit concert in 1966. In addition to protest songs and speeches from supporters, Nelson wanted to have his interview tapes edited to tell the story of the Harlem Six.

“I got a call from Truman Nelson saying: ‘I heard that you work with tape,’” Steve Reich tells me over the phone 50 years later. “I thought, I'm not a tape editor, but yeah, I've worked with it.”

Reich had realized his first tape piece the year before, based on a recording he made of San Francisco Pentecostal street preacher Brother Walter talking about Noah and the great flood. Walter proclaimed: “It’s gonna rain.”

Reich imagined that line as being sung in rounds and made two tape loops to test out his theory. But as he pressed play on his tape machines, a funny thing happened: The loops began in synch and then, as Reich recalls, “ever so gradually, the sound moved over my left ear and then down my left side and then slithered across the floor and began to reverberate and really echo. That whole process immediately struck me as a complete, seamless, uninterrupted way of making a piece that I had never anticipated.” Rather than a round about the rain, the sound turned apocalyptic. “It’s Gonna Rain” became Reich’s first major composition.

By 1966, Reich had returned to his home of New York City and was situated in a studio downtown when he first met Nelson. At that point, Reich was unfamiliar with the trial and events surrounding the Harlem Six. The burgeoning civil rights movement was one of the biggest concerns of the day, yet Reich in some way felt on the outside of the situation. “I wasn't doing anything about it really,” he admits. But he agreed to edit together Nelson’s 20 hours of analog interview tapes into a coherent narrative pro bono, under one condition: permission to make a piece along the same lines of “It’s Gonna Rain” if he found the right phrase. Nelson agreed.

The composer says he was looking “to find the key phrase, the exact wording of which would sum up the whole situation… and the tone of Hamm’s voice, the speech melody, and what he says encapsulated a lot of what was going on in the civil rights movement at that time.” Reich hums the line’s cadence over the phone. “When I heard that, I thought, This is going to make a really, really, really interesting piece.”

The composition opens with Hamm’s statement repeated three times before the two tape loops begin to move out of phase with each other. That subtle shift at first gives Hamm’s voice a slight echo and, by the three-minute mark, the words are swathed in reverb as the voices move out of synch. As the loops build, Hamm’s concrete imagery transforms into something hazy and unrecognizable as speech. As writer Linda Winer once put it in describing Reich’s tape works: "At first you hear the sense of the words—a common statement with cosmic vengeance inside. Then, like with any word repetition, the sounds become nonsense… And one is transfixed in a bizarre combination of the spiritual and the mechanistic."

For all of its subsequent influence, Come Out had an inconspicuous, even subliminal debut that April night at Manhattan’s Town Hall. The benefit, hosted by the Charter Group for the Harlem Six, featured protest songs, dramatizations from The Torture of Mothers, Reich’s commissioned audio narrative, and a speech by Ossie Davis, who had delivered the eulogy for Malcolm X the year before. Attendees would be hard-pressed to recall Come Out, though, and it received no notice or reviews in the press.

“The world premiere of Come Out was as pass-the-hat music,” Reich says with a laugh. Was there a reaction from the crowd? “Yeah, people were reaching in their pockets! I don't think people paid a great deal of attention to the music. They just thought it was some kind of funny sound effect that was atmospheric to get them to contribute. It wasn't a concert situation at all!”

Funds raised at the event allowed the Harlem Six and their families to pay for civil rights lawyer Conrad Lynn and other legal fees. Their case went to appeals in 1968, but retrials and three hung juries stretched the proceedings to 1973. After being held without bail for nine years, they finally plead to manslaughter in exchange for suspended sentences. Daniel Hamm was released the following year and has since avoided the public record. (I managed to get in contact with Hamm, who is now 70 years old, but he declined to comment for this story.) While a touchstone in the fight for civil rights, the case of the Harlem Six has almost vanished from popular culture as well. But Come Out continues to loop. In a 2009 essay, music academic Sumanth Gopinath wrote: "In retrospect, [Come Out] served as the most prominent historical memorial for the legal and political drama known as the Harlem Six case."

The month after Come Out’s low-key premiere, Reich performed at the Park Place Gallery in SoHo, a venue where his tape pieces were presented so that they closely aligned with minimalist art and sculpture. The show was reviewed in the Village Voice, which cited Come Out and noted: “Mr. Reich’s strident, reiterative work… suggested a raga exercise, distorting and distorting to incandescence.” In 1967, Come Out was recorded and released on CBS-Odyssey’s “Music of Our Time” record series, alongside titans of modern composition including John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Morton Feldman, and Terry Riley. It announced Reich’s arrival and garnered positive reviews in Time and New York magazine.

By the time of Hamm’s release from prison in 1974, Reich was at the vanguard of new American composition. Almost exactly 10 years after Come Out made its debut, he returned to Town Hall to present the world premiere of his landmark work, Music for 18 Musicians. “Come Out was the end of my working with tape, but it was the start of my taking the principle of phasing discovered with it and applying it to live musicians,” Reich says. “It was beginning of a highway, really, to the music of the rest of my life… the end of something and the beginning of something, simultaneously.”

With its hallucinatory looping, Reich's Come Out anticipates the sort of numbness and exhaustion that now results from a 24/7 news cycle that blends outrages and atrocities into a dangerous, undifferentiated mass.

Reich circa 1970. Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.

In the mid-’60s, electronic music was beginning to venture out from academia into popular music and culture, thanks to early adopters ranging from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach to the Beatles citing Karlheinz Stockhausen as an influence. But compositions like these required room-sized computers, expensive prototypes or rare synthesizers to enact. When it was released alongside such technologically rigorous compositions on that 1967 compilation album, New Sounds in Electronic Music, Reich’s Come Out stood out. The other works utilized sine wave generators and oscilloscopes, drawing on the resources at larger academic institutions, whereas Come Out was deceptively simple, the sound of the human voice captured on tape in an unadorned, documentary manner. Its implication was clear: Anyone with a tape recorder might be able to find new sounds in older ones.

Made in an era of mind-altering music and electronic effects, Come Out stands as psychedelic in its purest sense, finding something hallucinatory in the most basic of instruments. From these simple means an entire bewildering world of sound emerge, and the connotations of this transformation are vast.

Different listeners have heard larger metaphors in the composition: from urban uprisings and rioting, to the duplicity of voices signifying schizophrenia, to a Kafka-esque grinding up of Hamm in the machinations of bureaucracy and the justice system. There is something psychotic that bubbles up throughout the piece, a brutality and horror in the disaffect of Hamm’s speaking voice, in the image of bruise blood being squeezed so as to break the surface of his own skin, in a self-mutilation that reveals a greater injury. As the concrete details of Hamm’s beating were slowly erased amid years of trials and new racial atrocities perpetuated by law enforcement, Come Out even anticipates the sort of numbness and exhaustion that now results from a 24/7 news cycle that blends outrages and atrocities into a dangerous, undifferentiated mass.

And just as the piece has been interpreted intellectually, it’s rang out through various artistic environments as well. Captain Beefheart bellowed the central phrase multiple times on 1969’s Trout Mask Replica. And in 1982, it provided the soundtrack for Fase, a dance piece byBelgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Michèle Anne De Mey, and Jennifer Everhard that is now considered a cornerstone of contemporary dance.

But Come Out’s lasting artistic influence is most deeply felt in electronic music and DJ circles, factoring into ambient, house, trance, and trip-hop, and utilized by the likes of Orbital, UNKLE, and D*Note. Madlib cut up Hamm’s voice for the Madvillainy single “America’s Most Blunted.” Come Out opened Leon Vynehall’s recent BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix and it lies at the heart of Nicolas Jaar’s Resident Advisor 500 mix. Though musical references to Come Out often focus on its trance-inducing texture rather than its message, Jaar’s usage re-engages with the piece’s history. Not five minutes earlier in his RA mix, Jaar samples a line from dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson about “when the present is haunted by the past,” and then Daniel Hamm’s voice and blood come out in response. It’s a strange moment, with the brutality of the line haunting a sumptuous modern beat.

A photograph of Daniel Hamm taken from the 1980 docu-drama The Torture of Mothers, based on the story of the Harlem Six.

Reich says that because of the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation begat by the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, It’s Gonna Rain is “about the destruction of the world.” And, with Come Out, he wanted to do a piece that was as emotionally charged, “which is based in the real world around you.” Focusing on documentary material has shaped Reich’s oeuvre ever since, all the way through 2011’s WTC 9/11, which incorporates voice recordings that surrounded the September 11 attacks. “I'm documenting reality to portray something honestly without understatement or overstatement,” he says. “The key has been to stick to the facts.”

Was Come Out made as a piece of agitprop? “I think a lot of ‘political pieces’ are, to put it kindly, a waste of time,” Reich says. “If it’s a really good piece of music, then the political purpose to which it’s put is betrayed by the sense in which music will just vaporize, and the theme will vaporize along with it.” So while it might never be a rallying cry for a crowd of protesters, Come Out played a part in the civil rights movement, and each ensuing sample of it acknowledges the history and struggle that led to its creation.

For his part, Reich offers up another work of art as a parallel: Pablo Picasso’s 1937 mural, Guernica. It’s one of Picasso’s most famous pieces, a massive, grotesque gray painting measuring more than 11 feet tall and 25 feet wide. It’s one of the most-recognizable artworks of the 20th century, inspired by a report of a bombing of a Basque village in Spain on April 26, 1937. “It was deliberate civilian bombing for the first time,” Reich says. “What has become commonplace, the very nature of terrorism in our day—which is to aim for civilians—had never happened until Guernica.” In painting Guernica, Picasso brought worldwide attention to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, its name and imagery lasting even if the event behind it is no longer known. “Because it is such an outstanding painting, [it] has kept the memory of this town, and the significance of this bombing as a kind of memorial,” Reich says. “Good art preserves the stuff it’s about.”